A Solitary Journey (8 page)

W
hy haven’t you come to me? he asked. I see you in my dreams just as you see me. I know you’re there. You’ve been there a long time, but you don’t come.

I don’t know where you are, she told the darkness.

You know where I am. You were here before—but you didn’t stay.

She squinted against the solid black. I can’t see you.

Open the eyes of your mind, he said.

I don’t understand.

I need you.

But I can’t see you, she protested. I don’t know where you are.

The portal, he said.

She woke to a world of grey mist and broken branches digging into the skin of her back. Water gently babbled near her head and she thought that she was waking in the village—but she’d already done that, hadn’t she? She sat up, squinting against the dull grey light, and shivered. Everything was grey—the bush, the ground, the water in the creek, the pebbles in the water. The dream rippled like the creek.
What is a portal?
She felt
as if she should know what it was. And the other word came to the surface—glyph.
Why am I dreaming words?
she wondered. Then she remembered a pale contorted man lashed across the back of a black creature carved from stone and pinned by two battleaxes, one gold, one black.
Where did I see that?
Movement on the shallow bank made her tense as a black shape, a large bush rat, crept into the undergrowth and disappeared.
Am I obsessed with rats
? she mused, staring at the undergrowth.

She rubbed her eyes and got up slowly, warily testing her weight on her right ankle. The pain was gone. She checked the skin and was surprised to find that under the dirt there was no sign of bruising. She brushed the twigs and leaves from her ripped tunic and trousers and clambered up the bank. The mist was thinner out of the creek channel, but she could only choose her direction on the memory of where she’d come from during the night, so she searched for and located the marks she made when crossing the creek and scaling the bank and from them estimated the direction west.

She emerged at the edge of the forest where the white mist was already dissipating, leaving a crisp frost on the grass to evaporate under the rising sun. She was cold and still in shadow, but the vision of the sunrays caressing the tree canopy and a multitude of birds carolling the advent of sunshine through the forest cheered her. Gazing west she tried to locate familiar hills from which she could determine whether she needed to go north or south to find her travelling companions. The landscape didn’t provide enough clues, except to confirm that she had emerged somewhere near where the group had entered the forest at sunset the previous evening. Taking a guess, she walked south several hundred paces, scrutinising
the forest for signs of her party. When she had no success, she retraced her steps and headed north as the morning’s golden sunlight spilled across the landscape.

She stopped where the scuffed earth revealed the passage of a large group into the forest and, deciding that the bushes and trees looked familiar, she followed the tracks. A hundred paces into the forest she halted in horror before three smoking heaps of charred corpses. Scattered through the trees were torn pieces of faded cloth and the discarded bags and possessions carried by the women and children in their futile flight from the war. Eight mutilated bodies hung by their feet from branches. She guessed without going closer that they were men. With her eyes frantically searching the surrounding forest for the butchers who slaughtered her people, she backed away several paces before she turned and ran.

She hid until midday, watching and listening in case the barbarians were still hunting for people, before she gathered the courage to creep back to the forest charnel-house. Crows perched on the corpses pecked at the macabre morsels. She ran in, waving her arms to shoo the big black birds away, and they whisked silently to the edge of the clearing from where they watched her enviously with their shining black eyes. She couldn’t look at the faces as she tried to establish from the numbers of dead if anyone had escaped. She was relieved to discover there were no children’s bodies, and she sighed, thinking of Magpie. Only eight of the eleven men were dead. The corpses on the pyres were female, but there weren’t enough to make the hundred or more of the combined party. She searched the camp, alert to the surrounding forest, while the courageous members of the crow murder
waddled towards the bodies, glancing at Meg to make sure that she wasn’t going to interfere with their feeding fortune. The disturbed ground and dried blood told her the story of a brutal ambush where the people were cornered in groups and hacked down mercilessly.
I could have stopped this,
she thought.
I could have warned everyone, if I hadn’t been so stupidly clumsy,
and she sank to the earth and poured out her grief for the suffering and the killing that she hadn’t prevented.

When she rose, she looked over the scene of the massacre and knew that she could not bury so many dead. Some had escaped, but to where had they fled? She searched the perimeter of the campsite and found tracks that told her a main party, most likely the barbarians, were headed towards the plain. She saw scattered signs that individuals and sometimes more than one person had run deeper into the forest. There was no point following the barbarians, even if they took captives. What could she do against armed men? Her hope lay in tracking someone who escaped and her best hope was in following a group rather than an individual track. She considered the traces and made a choice.

Fifty paces beyond the camp, the small party’s tracks divided. At least three people went straight on and one bare footprint belonged to a smaller person, maybe a child. Another two or three went left. One went right. She followed the straight track. Further on, she found the body of a woman spread-eagled in the ruins of a thick bush—Blossom Beekeeper, cut down with a blow to her head and stabbed in the chest. Meg’s grief and anger welled and tears came again. Through watery eyes she saw the tracks did not go on. A barbarian had chased and killed her. But there were more than three tracks heading out and one set was
smaller. What happened to the child—if the tracks belonged to a child?

She rummaged through the undergrowth until she found what she feared most—Magpie’s body curled under a straggly bush five paces from Blossom’s corpse. She dropped to her knees and stared at the boy’s blood-stained rags, the dried blood caked around a deep wound on the side of his head. Mercifully his eyes were closed. Her hand shaking with grief, she brushed the boy’s dark tangled hair, wishing she’d had a chance to wash and brush it for him.
Why did he have to die so young?
She fought the tears and straightened up to look for a broken branch she could use to dig—Magpie deserved a grave—but rustling in the undergrowth startled her. She searched fearfully until she spied a black bush rat creeping through a bush behind the boy’s head. The animal stopped and peered at her, as if it was unafraid like the scavenging crows. ‘Leave him alone!’ she screamed, and charged wildly. The rat bolted and disappeared. Overcome with exhaustion, Meg sobbed and buried her head in her hands.
Magpie deserves a grave,
she reminded herself, and controlled her anguish.

Her search of the ground was fruitless, so she pulled and pushed a sturdy branch on a tree until it cracked from the trunk and sent her sprawling. She got up, cleaned the twigs and leaves from the branch and prodded the ground until she found soft earth and began to dig.

The task was laboriously slow and she only excavated a handspan’s depth before she slumped to the ground, gasping for breath. Wiping the sweat from her brow and nose she turned to the little corpse to say, ‘I’m sorry, Magpie. I don’t think I can do this.’
You can,
she scolded herself within.
You have to.
Then she stared. Had she imagined it? His leg twitched and he groaned.
‘Magpie!’ she whispered in amazement and crawled to his side. His eyes opened. ‘Magpie?’ she asked fearfully. ‘Can you hear me?’ The boy groaned again and shuddered, but his eyes didn’t seem to focus—only stare blankly at the dirt and dead leaves. ‘Oh Magpie,’ she pleaded, ‘don’t die. I won’t let you die. I won’t let you die.’ She slid her hands under his shoulders and head and eased his head onto her lap, brushing the grass and ants from his bloodied face. ‘I won’t let you die,’ she kept repeating. ‘You hear me? You’re not allowed to die.’ She fumbled with her waterbag and tipped water into her cupped palm, but the boy didn’t register it when she pressed it against his lips. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, letting the water trickle to the ground. ‘I won’t let you die.’ She shivered as a sharp tingling flashed along her spine.

The forest was moving into shadow. She had sat with the boy most of the day—crooning to him, letting him sleep, brushing his hair with her fingers, gently cleaning the dried blood away with water and cloth torn from her shredded tunic, rising only to relieve herself and stretch her aching limbs. She must have also drifted between wakefulness and sleeping like Magpie because the late afternoon shadows and cooling air arrived much more rapidly than she’d expected. She checked the boy and was satisfied that his breathing was stronger, but she knew she had to move him to a better site and she had to fetch water for them both. She was hungry. She rolled the remnant of her grey tunic into a pillow for Magpie and checked that he was comfortable before she went in search of a sheltered place.

Her memory of the night journey landscape was vague and didn’t correspond with what she was walking through, but she knew there was a creek to the
south so she weaved through the trees, deliberately scuffing the ground to leave a trail for her return, and eventually found a shallow valley with a tiny creek like the one she had stumbled upon the previous night. She chose a spot in the shelter of three large trees with an outcrop of granite as the place to where she would carry the boy and returned to fetch him.

Carrying Magpie was not as easy as she’d imagined and she struggled to cradle him in her arms, afraid of hurting him. The journey to the creek was painfully slow and when she finally set him down under the trees her back, arms and legs ached. She made him comfortable before she foraged for food.

The forest was an alien pantry. She collected yellow fungi, uncertain as to whether or not they would be safe to eat, peeled thin moss strips from rocks by the creek, found three fat witchetty grubs in the rotting trunk of a fallen tree and a large green-spotted gecko, and gathered cupped handfuls of nuts and seeds from bushes and trees before the evening closed.
The gecko will taste better cooked,
she decided. The moss and seeds would also make a good herbal tea, if she could heat water. Emma had taught her that. She reflected again on the name.
Was Emma my mother? How do I know her?
Emma had also taught her how to make a fire without flint.

Meg collected and built a small pile of tinder and put her hands above it and concentrated on creating a flame.
This is silly,
she thought. Nothing happened.
Why do I think this will work?
She shook her head as if the physical act could clear her mind of the negative thought and reconcentrated on generating fire. She closed her eyes to concentrate harder and imagined that she could see a fire. When she felt the heat on her palms she opened her eyes, amazed to find tiny flames dancing through the twigs and dead leaves and grass.
‘I did it!’ she yelled. ‘I made fire!’ She scrambled to her feet and fetched a dead branch that she broke to feed the fire before the tinder was burned out and grinned at her success. If there were barbarians they would see her campfire, but she had to risk it for Magpie’s sake. The night was as cold as the previous one and he had to be kept warm to survive. Without a tunic she also desperately needed the fire’s warmth. She should have taken clothes from the dead, from Blossom. She would retrieve something in the morning, she decided, because she couldn’t leave the boy in the night.

Having eaten her modest meal, savouring the lizard meat last of all, she gathered branches and leaves, fumbling in the flickering firelight to construct a makeshift shelter over Magpie, rescuing the dying flames regularly by sacrificing scraps of her building material. When it was complete she crawled in and cuddled against the sleeping boy’s back, watching the shadows shrink as the little fire shuddered and died.

In the dream, she stood in a golden field of ripe grain, rubbing her swollen belly, laughing at the antics of a dingo playing with two children. Around the trio a small black animal ran in a circle, and opposite her three men were smiling at the menagerie. The man with dark hair looked across at her and smiled. ‘Do you miss us like we miss you, Meg?’ he asked.

‘Button Tailor,’ she said. ‘Button, I’m sorry. I’d forgotten.’

‘Mummy?’ a little voice asked. She looked down and a little boy with red hair was looking up at her with green eyes. ‘Mummy?’ the boy asked.

She woke, weeping, with Jon’s name on her lips. Magpie was sleeping soundly. The forest was waking to
the misty morning when she eased out of the shelter and stamped her feet to boost the circulation, folding her arms across her breasts and rubbing her arms for warmth. She drank from her waterbag and walked quickly through the light mist and trees, retracing her faint trail to the old camp, her mind wading in memories and sadness that the dream had revived.

Jon was the red-haired boy she had buried in the village. Jon was her son. Her name was Meg Tailor. Button Tailor was her husband and she’d buried him along with two other men—her brothers, Mykel and Daryn. The memories poured back. The dingo was Sunfire. He’d grown old. And there was a rat—a black bush rat—Whisper. Her legs weakened and she stumbled, tears blurring the world. Against the ghostly mist the trees were dark silent shadows of her grief, but important parts of her memories were missing from the dream. She had buried four bodies, but she knew there should have been more. Jon was her eldest boy. But there were Emma and Treasure—her daughter and her younger son. Where were they? Why hadn’t she found them?
They were in the ashes of the house,
she thought and her stomach churned.
They perished in fire.
She slumped to her knees on the damp earth, and gasped for breath. ‘My children,’ she whispered, and sobbed. ‘My husband.’ Her vision of the world rippled again.